ABSTRACT
The meeting at Reval between King Edward VII and Tsar Nicholas II in June 1908 suggested to Turkish minds that the two great antagonists of the Eastern Question might be burying their differences and reaching agreement to dismember the Ottoman Empire.1 The fear of dismemberment was never far from Turkish thoughts, especially after the Congress of Berlin in 1878. There the Great Powers abandoned the principles of maintaining the integrity of the Ottoman Empire and non-interference in its internal affairs-principles they had adopted at the Paris Congress in 1856.2 At Berlin, the Ottoman Empire not only lost territory, it was also forced to reconcile itself to foreign intervention, ostensibly to supervise reform on behalf of the Porte’s non-Muslim subjects though more usually to further the interests of one Power or the other. That encouraged nationalism and separatism among subject peoples and created an explosive situation for the Porte. It may therefore be argued that the Powers were responsible for hastening the collapse of the Empire if only because they exploited a situation not of their making.
